Strength as a founding principle: the yardstick for us Europeans

For twenty-five centuries, European civilisation has recognised strength as the ultimate foundation of political order and its evolution. From Thermopylae to the civil war of the first half of the twentieth century, power has been regarded in Europe as the foremost of public and private virtues. Strong men defended families, villages, entire homelands and even motherlands. Religions, dynasties, forms of government and even the criteria for legitimacy changed, but one thing remained unchanged: the unshakeable certainty that no civilisation could survive without men (and women) prepared to fight and die for it. This certainty was not a barbaric relic destined to be superseded by progress (as quite a few descendants of that civilisation believe today): it was the beating heart of a worldview. The Greeks called it areté, the virtue manifested in excellence, and the supreme excellence was that of the warrior capable of holding the line when all seems lost. Plato might have quipped about the ignorance of soldiers, yet he had fought himself, and he could not have philosophised without the walls that others defended. The Romans transformed this insight into a system: virtus – the quality of the vir, the man – was first and foremost military courage, the ability to endure hardship and pain, and loyalty to one’s comrades and to Rome. A Roman who did not know how to fight was a citizen in name only.

Europe has produced and honoured philosophers, saints, artists and scientists, but has always reserved the highest prestige for those who guaranteed the very existence of the political community or who were perhaps prepared to expand it. Leonidas, Caesar, Charles Martel, Charlemagne, the mercenary captains, Napoleon and the national armies of the nineteenth century all belong to the same ideal lineage: that of a civilisation which believed in strength, since freedom had to be defended by force of arms. Such was the cult of strength that the Romans found themselves, to their horror, admiring their greatest enemy: Hannibal. The man who had crossed the Alps with elephants, who had destroyed Roman armies, was regarded with the sacred awe reserved for natural phenomena. Strength, even that of the enemy, automatically commanded respect. Significantly, Rome defeated Hannibal only when it was able to produce a general capable of emulating him – Scipio Africanus, who, at Zama, paid the greatest tribute to the Phoenician commander by revealing that he had studied the Carthaginian as a master.

Christianity brought about an unprecedented moral revolution. The least among us entered the annals of history; the poor ceased to be outcasts from society, and every good Christian was called upon to see in them the very face of Christ. Widows and orphans acquired a dignity unknown to the ancient world, and mercy became a guiding principle of civil life. In the space of a few centuries, an entire civilisation was turned upside down from its very foundations. Benedict of Norcia (c. 480–547) codified this spiritual revolution. His "Regula" was the founding text of Western monasticism: a balance between prayer (ora) and work (labora), moderation, stability of residence, and obedience to the abbot. For centuries, Benedictine monasteries became the centres of European culture, custodians of ancient manuscripts, schools for theologians and historians, hospitals and refuges for pilgrims. But no one ever forgot that these architectural and intellectual cathedrals existed in a precarious balance: only force could have guaranteed their survival. Within the monasteries and on the streets of the villages, one might turn the other cheek, but the walls had to be constantly protected by armed warriors and revered by the people.

Christianity was a revolution that did not abolish the primacy of force, but profoundly altered its meaning and moral justification. The sword became the bulwark of a civilisation founded on the protection of the weakest. Thus arose the doctrine of bellum iustum, or just war: not every conflict was lawful, but war waged to defend the innocent and protect the Church, to curb the tyranny of despots and, of course, to defend Christendom as a whole, was deemed lawful. The miles Christianus was called upon to be a lamb amongst his brothers and a lion in the face of the enemy. The Crusaders were the most radical expression of this: men convinced that they could be saints precisely because they were prepared to kill and die for the faith. The example of the Knights Templar reveals just how deeply the cult of force had penetrated the European consciousness. For over a millennium, Christendom lived with the awareness that it was a besieged citadel. The great Islamic expansions, the Viking and Hungarian raids, the sieges, and the pressure exerted throughout the Mediterranean and in the very heart of Europe made armed defence the very condition for the conceivability of Western existence. Today there is a state that justifies the use of violence against the enemy (often appalling in and of itself) by arguing that if its adversaries were to lay down their arms, there would be peace; but if they were to do so, it would result in the definitive annihilation of the State of Israel. Well, this kind of mindset permeated the whole of Western history right up to the end of the Second World War, and today it has left Europe to become the sole preserve of the victorious West: America.

All attempts to imperialise the European political sphere, just like the efforts to prevent the construction of a continental empire – the true underlying theme of European history since the fall of the Western Roman Empire – have been underpinned by the idea that only force could preserve freedom and our civilisation. Without warriors, there would have been no monasteries, universities, cathedrals, free cities, trade or works of mercy; without a force capable of safeguarding civilisation, even its highest values would have vanished. The armed dialectic between imperialisation and the resistance of communities created the interstices into which the entire European experience of freedom and self-government seeped. Europe’s glory has been an armed space without an empire.

When Europeans set out to explore the globe at the start of the modern era, their greatest surprise was not the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, but the realisation of their enormous technological superiority and power compared with the rest of the world. The Maya, Aztec and Inca empires collapsed before the new arrivals with a speed that astonished even the conquistadors themselves: Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro destroyed empires with very few warriors. But over time it became clear that even the fabled Eastern civilisations – Ming China, Mughal India, the Islamic world – had lagged far behind Europe. Europe was spilling over its own borders not only through brute force, but by virtue of superior technical mastery: artillery, ocean-going navigation, military discipline and the logistics of supply. European power subjugated the entire world without a second thought, for it believed that might made right. This conviction was not cynicism, but a philosophy consistent with the whole of European history. Conquest required no justification: God had shown where right and wrong lay by granting victory. The missionaries who followed the conquistadors brought the Gospel, but the Gospel arrived at the point of the sword – and no one, not even the most tormented of the defenders of the indigenous peoples such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, truly questioned Europe’s right to rule the world.

Even the formation of the modern state is, at its roots, an explosion of violence without parallel. The prestige of the new political organisation is entirely at stake on the battlefield: it is no coincidence that the great theorists of the state emerged in eras of civil war and incessant interstate conflict. Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" in a Italy torn apart by conflict, and Jean Bodin published his masterpiece four years after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; Hobbes conceived "Leviathan" against the backdrop of the English Civil War. They all converge on the same truth: the state is power (monopolised, as Max Weber would say). Heinrich von Treitschke, whose influence was felt for nearly three decades at the University of Berlin towards the end of the nineteenth century, elevated this insight to a system. For him, the state was Macht, Macht, und Wieder Macht – power, power, and more power. This was the synthesis of a tradition of thought which, from Machiavelli to Hegel, had placed the state at the centre of history as the ultimate subject of human action. The state, like other great manifestations of the Spirit such as language and writing, historicises humankind, tears it away from its animal condition and inserts it into a web of meanings that transcends the individual: it does so through the violent splendour of a creative force. For Treitschke, war was not an anomaly of the political order, but its moment of truth: in conflict, the state reveals its true nature, stripping itself of all legal and moral rhetoric. To illuminate the nature of this absolute sovereignty, Treitschke invoked the words of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden: ‘I recognise no one above me, save God and the victor’s sword’. Above the sovereign state there is only God – and after God, nothing but the power of the strongest. The state is a power that encounters no obstacles in its path, which is self-founded and identifies itself with its own boundlessness and irresistibility; in other words, it ‘tolerates no higher, co-ordinated power than its own’. Sovereignty is the fortified essence of the state.

That strength was indeed the yardstick by which European public figures were measured is demonstrated, paradoxically, even by those who seem furthest removed from it: when, in 1919, Luigi Sturzo called on Italian Catholics to participate in politics, setting aside the ‘non expedit’, he addressed the ‘free and strong’ – in other words, a mystical priest was speaking the same language as the conquistadors and the Templars. Weakness could be understood and tolerated, but political action required the contribution of the “strong”. What has become of the cult of strength? After the Second World War, it vanished from the European radar as swiftly as one might wish to forget a nightmare. Not only that: what has prevailed, whether from an institutional or a cultural perspective, is a veritable continental cult of weakness.

The explosion of violence during the thirty-year period from 1914 to 1945 has truly left a profound mark. To draw a somewhat far-fetched parallel, it is as if a man had suffered from priapism for weeks, enduring unspeakable suffering, and consequently came to regard any sexual desire as extremely dangerous, repressing it with the very same energy with which he had previously indulged it. Power has not simply become suspect: it has retreated into the shadows as a taboo. And as such, it must be eradicated. At an institutional level, the Europe that emerged after 1945 built its democracies around principles opposed to those of Treitschke: not might, but a headless and ethereal power – certainly capable of extracting as much money as possible from its subjects, but guaranteeing an end to the shedding of blood. Any politician who stepped into the European limelight talking of problems to be solved and decisions to be taken was immediately accused of ‘decisionism’: the rule was one of perpetual balance, which made decision-making impossible. The post-war constitutions – Italian, German, French – are all structures designed to prevent the concentration of command. The Weimar Republic had taught that democracy could bring about its own downfall by entrusting extraordinary powers to a single man: and so systems were built in which no one had enough power to actually achieve anything.

In Italy, this process took on almost caricatural proportions. The pure proportional representation system, the perfect bicameral system, the absence of constructive no-confidence motions: all these factors combined to produce governments that lasted only a few months, because the very duration of a government was perceived as a danger. Mussolini had immunised the nation against the ‘strongman’ to such an extent that the patient had developed a permanent allergy to any manifestation of authority. Governmental weakness was the stated aim of the political system, the price to be paid to avoid falling back into authoritarian temptation. The party-based political system – with its endless balances of power and ritual crises, the Cencelli manual – was the perfect mechanism to ensure that no one could ever exercise power.

Culturally speaking, this shift gave rise to what Gustavo Zagrebelsky would have called, in a successful book, "mild law": a conception of law as an instrument of mediation rather than command, geared towards compromise. ‘Gentle law’ is the exact opposite of Gustavus Adolphus’s sword: it recognises neither God nor the victor as its superior, but rather dialogue, consensus and gentle procedure. Force, which for two thousand years had been the foundation of the European political order, becomes an obscene entity: something to be concealed and exorcised through an increasingly sterile and legalistic vocabulary. Even the current outcry across Europe against an American president whose only fault is that he behaves exactly like every man of power in history – that is, by seeking to increase the power of his already immensely powerful country – must be seen as a resurgence of revulsion towards force. In a sense, even the continent’s infatuation with the previous American president – that Joe Biden who constantly projected nothing but listlessness – stems from this new European cult. In short, Europe’s decline not only has very deep roots, but is also overburdened with good intentions.

Luigi Marco Bassani, formerly a full professor of the History of Political Doctrines at the University of Milan, is now a full professor of the same subject at Pegaso University. His article continues *Il Foglio*’s summer series dedicated to the concept of force. Each week, a different author will examine this concept from the perspective of a specific discipline. The other instalments were published on 7 July (Michele Silenzi, “La forza che regge il mondo”) and 14 July (Luca Amendola, “Tra la forza e la materia”).